Africa

Having spent a couple of days glad-handing (and watching baseball) with Raul Castro in Cuba, 89-year-old Fidel Castro has come out swinging against "the empire" with a bristling 1500-word open letter recounting the history of US aggression against Cuba suggesting Obama "reflects and doesn't try to develop theories about Cuban politics." Despite all of The White House's claims of progress, Castro rages "we don't need the empire to give us any presents."

When last we checked in on Djibouti, the tiny east African nation of 900,000 people that shares a border with lawless Somalia to the south, and is separated from war-torn Yemen by just 13 miles of water across the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, China had just announced that the country would play host to Beijing’s first overseas military outpost.

Nearly 5,000 miles from the Chinese capital, Djibouti is situated in a highly strategic, if exceedingly dangerous part of the world.

Submitted by Chris Perrin via TheAntiMedia.org,

Authored by Chris Campbell, via LFB.org,

“Of all tyrannies,” C.S. Lewis once wrote, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

 

“It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

 

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.